Monkey Business — Equal Work Demands Equal Pay
When someone is treated unfairly — through pay discrimination — it’s so obvious, even a primate knows it.
Are University Block Grants the Right Way to Fund Open Access Mandates?
While block grants may be a preferred way to disperse money to fund public access mandates, their actual use may cause problems for researchers and universities.
(Re)Defining the Library, Part 1: Why?
With changes in the scholarly communications world, many old questions for the library are unsettled once again, and many news ones arise. In this first part of a two-part post, we’ll ask the questions.
Udacity Redux: And Then There Was Credit
Udacity students can now transfer credits to Colorado State. Is this the start of something big?
And Another Thing — A Postscript to the Proposed List of 60 Things Publishers Do
In addition to what publishers do directly for authors and readers, they foster many collaborative and philanthropic efforts around the world.
Dictionaries, Maps, and Waste — Thoughts on Publishing Economics, Digital Economics, and Human Frailty
“Waste” is hard to define, and therefore hard to eliminate. And it’s not just a print phenomenon. Perhaps we need more than the minimum because the world is unpredictable, our abilities are finite and fleeting, and intellectual work is fairly extravagant.
How Did They Get My Email Address? The Accidental and Plentiful Supply of Academic and Scientific Contacts
The open nature of email addresses on journal sites may be feeding the email harvesting machine for academic emails. Worse, it may also be exposing these for potentially fraudulent activity.
“A Hazard of New Fortunes” — A Review
A review of William Dean Howells’ 1890 novel, “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” which is about finding new business models for media businesses. The book describes an economic landscape that is eerily similar to our own.
The "Facebook Fallacy" and Whipsaw Attitudes Toward Web Advertising
Facebook’s IPO has disappointed many, but to think that it presages a complete meltdown of the online ad market is a bit of an overstatement.
E-books and the Personal Library
Moving from the West Coast to the East prompts some thoughts on personal libraries and e-books, as it no longer makes economic sense to carry a lifetime of books around with us. But maybe economic sense isn’t the only sense bibliophiles possess . . .
The Reproducibility Initiative — Solving a Problem, or Just Another Attempt to Draw on Research Funds?
A new initiative seeks to solve the reproducibility problem in science, but instead seems to be creating more of a drag on research funds, ignoring the incentives of scientists, and raising barriers to its very utilization.
Is the Higher Education Bubble About to Pop?
The potential higher education funding bubble may be more likely to burst, with the LIBOR scandal revealing another weakness in the system, trends in admissions and discounting showing the effects of the recession, and American politics locked up in partisan nonsense.
The NPR Model and the Financing of Scholarly Communication
The “listener support” model works in some cases. This fact alone suggests it may not have a robust future in the funding of scholarly initiatives.
Disruption — Are We Seeing a New Type Emerging in Academic Publishing?
When we hear “disruption” invoked, we think it’s about technology and innovation. What if there are other types of disruption? What if there isn’t a market demanding change, but others demanding disruption?
Driving Innovation: Finding the Balance Between Fair Reward and Profiteering
Vitriol may have obscured important points in a post last week. The growing business strategy of our era is to drive the cost of everyone else’s product to zero in order to make more money from your own product. This imbalance stifles innovation and creation.